Watch It Work
by Bainaku
Summary: Marceline wasn't always a problem.
1. Part I

**A/N: **I liked a Tumblr friend's idea of writing snippets of interaction between Bubblegum and Marceline as the former ages. Here's the first one. =) I'll try to write three or four more.

I hope you enjoy it!

**Words: **2,774

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**WATCH IT WORK – [PART I]**

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"Where are we going?"

"I toldja, kid. A special place. Now stop squirming—I'll drop you."

Bubblegum blows a raspberry into Marceline's throat. Her lips splutter just above the vampire's pair of bitemarks. "You will _not_."

"Yeah?" Marceline grins down at Bubblegum and makes a great show of loosening one arm. "Sure about that?" The girl's legs slip into open air. Her dress gutters against the breeze and she provides a giggling squeal, noosing her grip tighter still about Marceline's neck. "Because," Marceline continues, feigning haughtiness, "I don't know about certain _other_ monarchs in the vicinity, but when I say I'm gonna do something I'm usually pretty serious about it."

She unhooks both arms and lets Bubblegum dangle. The princess shrieks, scrabbles at Marceline's shoulder: but she's just a kid and not very strong, and a scuttering second later her fingers slip free and she's falling, falling down into the night like a pale pink comet trailed by a tail of laughter.

Marceline watches her plummet about ten feet before sweeping beneath the princess to catch her again. She narrowly misses a flailed fist to the face. "Higher!" Bubblegum demands, chest heaving, hair a springy snarl of tangles. The moonlight flashes sharp over her smile and she begs, "Please? _Please_, Marceline? Take me higher!"

_Kids made of sugar are way too freakin' hyper_, reflects Marceline as she obligingly makes for the clouds once more. This is maybe the tenth time tonight she's indulged the little monarch's plea for aerobatics—it probably won't be the last either. Truth be told, Marceline doesn't mind. The queen has hundreds of amicable acquaintances but not many close personal friends, much less does she know anyone who's willing to worship her the way Bubblegum does. So what if the princess is eight years old? To someone like Marceline, whose birthday stopped mattering over a thousand years ago, time and age are both concepts largely left ignored.

An elbow sinks into her ribcage. Marceline winces. It will admittedly be nice when Bubblegum's not so _pointy_, though. "Bonni," she mutters, "hey, c'mon. Watch it, okay?"

"Sorry, sorry!" Wriggling around to better face her chauffeur, Bubblegum slides her arms back around the vampire and sighs. As they gain altitude she darts out the occasional foot, kicking curiously at the tentacles of fog curling low beneath the clouds. "Are we almost there?" she pursues.

Marceline squints into the west, where the horizon is a smudge of grays and purples like fingerprints on a window. "Yeah. About ten minutes. Maybe less." Feeling her small friend's jitter of anticipation, she urges, "If you listen and you're quiet"—and she lowers her voice, hoping Bubblegum will get the same idea—"you'll hear it before you see it."

Bubblegum squinches up her face and sucks in her breath to hold it. She makes it about thirty seconds before gasping out, "I can't!"

"Quiet," Marceline reinforces. "Not _silent_. Breathing's golden, Bittybite." As her cargo gratefully resumes respiration, the vampire queen gives Bubblegum a jiggle and murmurs, "Just listen. Close your eyes and _listen_."

The swish of her feet slowing to a halt, the princess sinks sidelong into Marceline's elbow and obeys. She licks her lips. Her cheek rasps the collar of the bomber jacket Marceline found in the depths of her closet and gifted to the girl to keep her warm on nights like these, when the wind is sloughing in from the east and bringing with it the red-orange promise of autumn. Below them the shadows of the clouds march across the land like footprints, and Bubblegum twitches suddenly and asks, brow furrowed, "Is that your stomach? That noise?"

She makes a tipping motion with a hand, seesawing her fingers back and forth in the pale blue moonlight. "Nope," Marceline disagrees. "Nice try." There's a glimmer in the distance then, a faint whisper of movement. Smirking, she flicks her eyes between it and the princess and wiggles her brows. "Look," she says, and Bubblegum does, straining at the bower of the vampire's arms.

"Oh!" Bubblegum's mouth forms the shape of that sound, round and soft and dark. She points, sticking out a finger as she might a flag. "Marceline! _Marceline_, is that—" Her hand slips and she folds down over Marceline's wrist like a bag of flour, the zipper of her jacket raking at the vampire's thumb. "Is that the _ocean_?" she wheezes, scrabbling for purchase. "Is that really the _ocean_? Marceline!"

Princesses are slight, slippery little creatures, and it takes all Marceline's inherent skill at wrangling to keep Bubblegum from taking an unplanned dive down south. "Geez, yeah," Marceline laughs, and chases that with, "_chill out_, Bittybite. You're slowing us down. Do you wanna get there or what?"

"Yes! Yes, I do! So go faster!"

Bubblegum swats at Marceline's hip. Her open palm smacks into the ridge of it with a sharp _whap _and Marceline jerks midair, snapping at the princess next, "Yo! Not a horse here!" Too enthralled by the glitter of the sea in the distance, though, Bubblegum makes no reply.

Grumbling, Marceline lets it slide. Within minutes they are close enough to smell the surf, and just as the moon whispers into the sky's ninth slot the vampire queen touches down on the beach. She lowers Bubblegum to the sand. She expects the princess to shoot off toward the water immediately, but instead Bubblegum eases back against her and gropes for her hand and just _looks_, looks down the coast all thalo and soft for the moonlight. The sand is unmarked in all directions but for the speckle of shells near the tideline and the scalloped swoops in the dunes where the breeze goes to bunker, and the air is full of the relentless _schoom-shaaaa _of the waves.

"This is the end of Ooo," Bubblegum says thoughtfully. She worries her fingers between Marceline's, not because she's scared—or at least the vampire doesn't think so. Bubblegum doesn't _look _scared. Tipping her face up to the queen, the princess purses her lips and nudges, "It is, isn't it?"

Marceline scuffs her boot in the sand, toes it off, and agrees, "Yeah, I guess it is. Take off your shoes, kid—leave 'em here."

They shed their footwear together. Somewhere out beyond the breakers a fish jumps, and Bubblegum smiles and points to it silently. Marceline nods. Tightening her fingers over the other monarch's, the princess leads the vampire down the beach, taking turns shifting her eyes between the waves and the dunes. "What's out there?" she asks. "The maps all end here, with the water."

Shrugging, Marceline replies, "Islands. One or two."

"And beyond those?"

Marceline hesitates—a second. Another. And then: "I dunno, Bittybite."

Dragging her feet in the sand to slow them, Bubblegum pouts. "You do _so _know," she insists. "You're _old_, Marceline." The vampire queen twitches, aiming a glare at her cohort. With the tiniest of smirks the princess resumes, "And with age comes _wisdom_. Right?"

"Might wanna work on your diplomacy there."

"Marce_liiiiine_." Bubblegum gives the vampire's hand a studious yank. "Come on. You do know something, don't you? You _always _know something. Tell me!"

The waves purr. In each swell there is a wink of starshine, an eye blinking over and over, and Marceline blows stale air through her fangs and says, "A long time ago—"

"How long?" solicits the princess immediately. Marceline doesn't bother feeling offended—Bubblegum's a constant well of questions no matter the subject, her interruptions as expected as each day's dawn. The vampire reaches up with her free hand and rubs her thumb over her bitemarks in answer.

"Before these."

"Aaaaah," realizes Bubblegum. "Before the primordial ooze, then."

"I can and will suck out your brain, Bonnibel."

"You don't like chewy stuff," dismisses the princess easily. Wrapping both hands about Marceline's wrist now, she pulls her friend toward the nibbling surf and nudges, "A long time ago?"

The first of the waves sweeps over their feet, all froth and foam. Bubblegum dances, the too-long sleeves of her jacket _whup-whupping _down across her fingers; Marceline smirks and digs her bare toes into the wet sand. It's been a long time since she came to this place—since she walked on a beach. Since someone she cared about held her hand. "A long time ago," she starts again, "there wasn't an Ooo." She opens her mouth to go on, pauses—falters. Another wave bubbles gently up to her ankles, soaking the cuffs of her jeans. "There wasn't an Ooo," she repeats.

"Okay." Bubblegum stops and leans down to look at something in the water. It's a bit of seaweed strangled around a stick, and she pokes it and goes on, "So what was there? If there wasn't an Ooo?"

"A big mess," mutters Marceline. Bubblegum looks over her shoulder at the vampire, holding the seaweed now between thumb and forefinger, her other palm leaving the queen's grip to cup the sodden plant almost tenderly. Thinking suddenly that this is no place for cynicism, Marceline shakes her head and amends, "It was the world, that's all. A huge, massive world and this was only one place among thousands, and the rest were all out there."

She gestures to the sea, its glittery sprawl going on forever and ever into the night. Bubblegum's eyes follow the motion. "Out there," she echoes. "Not islands." It's not quite a question.

"Not islands," confirms Marceline anyway. "Well—I mean. Yeah," she backpedals, "there were _some _islands. Really big ones."

Bubblegum straightens. She's squinting hard at the horizon, her mouth curled, her eyes assessing. She's a smart kid—heck, smarter than maybe most of the other monarchs in Ooo. "Something happened to them," she observes. "Right?"

"Right."

"A war. Wars. The Mushroom Wars," the princess murmurs, and drops her gaze to the seaweed again. She begins to disentangle it from the stick and proceeds down the beach at a slow march. Marceline follows. "Why"—and Bubblegum asks this quietly—"were there wars at all?"

"You've got a library at your castle, kiddo."

"Yeah. But it's mostly," Bubblegum confides, "full of cookbooks."

"…considering all your peeps are made of food, that's pretty, uh… morbid."

"Not at all! My people have to reproduce _somehow_, Marceline."

"Oh great, so it's all sugar porn, huh?"

"Ew," the princess determines, and presses next, "_really_, Marceline. Why did the Mushroom Wars start?"

Marceline sighs. "I dunno. I don't," she reinforces when Bubblegum whips around to frown at her. "You've gotta keep in mind, I was little myself when everything went from bad to total shitstorm, Bonnibel—younger than you, even. My mom died and my dad wasn't around and—" She stops because Bubblegum's face changes: it _softens_ and dang it, Marceline doesn't need sympathy from an eight-year-old. Clearing her throat, she mutters, "Anyway. I don't know why people started fighting in the first place. They'd been doing it for a long time before I was born, you know, pushing buttons they had no business being around to begin with—"

"What's that mean?"

The vampire queen considers. At length she replies, "They were bombing each other. Lighting the world on fire. Bada boom, baby."

Bubblegum says nothing. Instead she drops the seaweed and reaches for Marceline's hand again, and her palm is cold and wet against the vampire's flesh.

After a moment Marceline continues, "All those other places I mentioned before? They might still be out there, Bonnibel. Or they might've burned into nothing a long time ago."

"You've never checked to see which it is?"

"Nah."

"Why not?"

Squeezing Bubblegum's hand, Marceline says, "Sometimes it's better to wonder and hope."

The beach is getting hilly, the waves struggling to scramble up the sand. Bubblegum digests Marceline's words and eventually hurls the seaweed into the dunes. "They should have talked to each other," she informs the queen at last. "Those people. Instead of pushing buttons, they should have just _talked _to each other. Talking fixes everything."

"Yeah? You think so?"

"Uh-huh. You're a queen, Marceline—you should know that."

Glancing aside at Bubblegum's mutinous expression, Marceline allows, "Sometimes people don't want to talk, Bittybite." The princess scowls, a protest on her lips, and Marceline finishes, "But there's nothing wrong with trying to make them listen."

Placated, Bubblegum smiles. Skimming her heel through the surf, she kicks clots of foam toward Marceline and agrees, "Yeah, okay." And then, "Where does the beach go? Where are _we _going?"

"Who said we're going anywhere?" pursues the queen, grateful for the shift in topic.

Bubblegum's smile blooms into a grin. "You did. You said we were going to a _special_ place. Did you really fly us all the way here so we could walk on the beach? It's cool—but it's not _special_."

"What if I _did _bring us here to walk on the beach? Long moonlit stroll—"

"You didn't. You're not that boring. You don't _stroll_."

"Now that," agrees Marceline, "is a true story." She stops and peels her hand free of Bubblegum's. Stooping to squeeze the water from her jeans, she urges the princess to, "Look out west. See anything weird?"

West: where the beach gives rise to hills, and the hills to cliffs, and the cliffs to—

"There's a thing—a bowl!" breathes Bubblegum. "An upside-down bowl against the sky!"

"Mmm-hm." Slapping her hands dry on her hips, Marceline picks up Bubblegum and makes for the huge curved thing sticking out like a thumb on the cape's bluff. "It's an old place," she says. "Most don't remember it. Any guesses as to what it is?"

"Closer," commands the princess. She does have the decency to add, "Please?"

Marceline complies. They drift in a semicircle around it, the wind cold off the ocean but questing too, ruffling Marceline's hair and her small friend's dress. Against the stone cliff the bowl is faintly green, metal eaten by the mold of years. There are holes in it too, yawning and dark, and vines creeping over its lower walls. Through one of the holes a long, thick pole protrudes, slumped in its moorings, its end a glass eye looking out over the ocean. Marceline drifts up alongside the last and polishes it with her sleeve.

"I've never seen anything like it before," admits the princess. She taps her fingernails on the glass, _ting-ting-ting_. "What is it, Marceline?"

"Telescope," Marceline replies. She lights on the pole and walks down its length into the housing dome. "This place was an observatory. Once upon a time, people used it to look at the stars."

It takes Bubblegum but a half-second to realize, "This is a giant _magnifying glass_?"

"Bingo."

"_Awesome_! Can we look through it? Does it work?"

In answer, Marceline hops from the telescope's pole onto the dome's tiled floor. It's green too, nibbled by moss; the smell of rust is pervasive. The seat at the telescope's base rotted away long ago, but there's still a pedestal where it was and upon this Marceline plants her eager charge. "Here," she says, tapping the eyepiece. "You can move it too. Just be careful. Shit's ancient."

"Probably younger than you," teases Bubblegum. She grins and lowers her face over the eyepiece. A moment passes. Two.

Marceline thinks the princess is unimpressed until she realizes the kid's holding her breath again.

"Like it?" she asks. Bubblegum gives the tiniest nod, mute, and Marceline pursues, "Whatcha see, Bittybite?"

Bubblegum leans back with wide eyes and looks at the vampire, her lips parted, her hands flared over the telescope's smooth casing. "They're like salt," she says. "Salt scattered _everywhere _up there, Marceline!"

"Yeah. Infinite tablecloth, spilled shaker—whatever. Maybe you can write some lyrics for me one day." Leaning over, the queen takes hold of the scope's rotating handle and insists, "Let me show you Orion. Dude's got a belt you won't _believe_."

They spend hours looking through the telescope, and in the end they only stop because Bubblegum is falling asleep standing up and Marceline's eyes are watering too, reduced to faucets in her face. Stars are suns, after all. Distant or not, they still sting.

"I don't wanna go," the smaller monarch moans as the vampire makes to lift her. She is almost unconscious not a moment later, limp and sprawled and sleepy in Marceline's arms, her fingers still crooked as though curled about the telescope's handles.

"Hey, don't worry," Marceline assures the dozing princess. "We'll come back."

"We will?" yawns Bubblegum hopefully. "Promise?"

"Sure. There's lots more to look at." As they drift free of the dome and out into the night, the vampire smirks heavenward. "I mean, c'mon. It's a big, big sky."


	2. Part II

**A/N: **Part II! Sorry it's late—forgot to post it here!

Hope you enjoy it!

**Words: **2,827

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**WATCH IT WORK – [PART II]**

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"Tell me about boys," Bubblegum requests.

Marceline looks up from where she's strumming her bass on the smaller monarch's bed, splaying her fingers over the strings to shush them quiet. She blinks and stares at the princess, who is fiddling with her hair and pretending not to steal glances at Marceline in her mirror. Bubblegum's cheeks are pink. Well, pinker than usual.

"Tell me about boys," she says again.

Marceline sighs and hikes up her sleeve. Despite that there's no watch there, she slaps her thumb against her wrist and asks, "Weren't you a kid just five minutes ago?"

"My birthday was last week. I'm thirteen," the princess insists, like that's actually supposed to mean something. "_Thirteen_," she stresses, and pivots on her vanity bench to give Marceline her full attention. She puts on a pitiful face, the kind wherein her eyes do that weird slick-shiny thing and her cheeks puff out and her lips turn into a rosebud. Marceline, who was recently given reason to hate roses, finds it nauseating. "Please, Marceline?"

"Bug one of your other friends about it," dismisses the vampire. Dropping her head back onto one of Bubblegum's various pillows—the princess probably has about sixty scattered around and geez, they're all pink—Marceline drags her hand down hard over her guitar's stem. The strings grind out a hoarse _skreee_.

"I did! I asked Lumpy Space Princess and wow, let me just say this, okay?" Grimacing, Bubblegum confesses, "Her version of a boy is a semisolid cloud filled with noxious gases."

"Hey, that's pretty accurate." Marceline grins and curls her fingers, softening her instrument's protest into a purr. "Stick with your friend. She sounds like a genius. And besides"—the vampire flicks her elbow in; her guitar shudders with the force of its next chord—"I'm not the best person to ask about dudes."

Throwing her arms out, Bubblegum denies, "What? You're the _perfect _person to ask! In fact, you're my number one reliable source!"

"Feel free to keep the flattery flowing, babe, but it's not gonna get you _anywhere_."

"Marceline." The younger monarch's voice garners a note of pleading. "I'm _serious_. You _are _my number one reliable source."

Marceline glances over at the princess, her brows arched, her hand's heel drumming down into her guitar's frets. _Spang_! Bubblegum's expression is serious enough to merit a smirk. "Yeah?" the queen murmurs. "And why's that exactly?"

"Well, you've got that Ash guy, right?" the princess starts in eagerly. "You two have been together for like a hundred years—"

Marceline looks away, her teeth clicking together in her mouth, her lifeline—spent long ago—pressed flat to the strings. Bubblegum stops. Between them the guitar's whine fades into nothing, a slow, seeping _twnnnnn_, and the smaller monarch frowns and tips her head and surveys Marceline with a gaze suddenly too sharp to belong to someone so young.

"Marceline?" she ventures.

Turning her eyes ceilingward, the vampire shrugs and allows, "Yeah, about that. We broke up." But that's not _quite _true and Marceline's no liar, so she amends, "I broke up with him." She laces her fingers over her guitar's stem, pressing the instrument tight to her collar. It's a comfortable, solid weight there, pressing sharp just above where her sleeve joins the body of her shirt.

There is a moment of quiet. Maybe it's a moment of _startled _quiet, or _thoughtful _quiet—Marceline's never been very good at deciphering the difference. Next the bed dips as Bubblegum crawls onto the mattress, a delicate press of palms and knees nearby the vampire's hip. "Why?" she asks.

Marceline shrugs. "Because he was a dbag."

"I'm not familiar with that abbrevia—"

"Douchebag, Bonnibel. He was a _douche_bag."

"Oh." And then, "Like… all the time and you just got tired of it, or he did something that was unforgivable?"

Edging up along the bed's lavender comforter, Bubblegum's hand finds Marceline's kneecap and folds over it. Squeezes. Marceline smiles and answers, jiggling the leg, "He sold my favorite thing so he could go buy himself a stupid magic wand."

"He did _what_?" fumes the princess immediately. She slaps her hands down, one against the mattress and the other straight down onto Marceline's thigh. The whole bed rocks, and one of the pillows—fuchsia and frilled, also heart-shaped—goes sailing off across the room as the vampire jackknifes aright. "Do I need to go find him?" Bubblegum seethes, narrowly missing a bonk on the head from the guitar's flailing neck. She furls her fingers into fists and maintains, "Where does he live? Because I will make him _pay_—"

"_You_," Marceline disagrees, "will take a _chill pill_, whoa."

"No! No, I will be righteously indignant on your behalf because—because you moved _in _with him and let him touch all your stuff and… and you said you even made him _sandwiches_!" With a splutter, the princess demands, "Who does something so mean to someone who's willing to make them a _sandwich_? That's just—that's just—_ooooh_!"

Before Marceline can get in another word edgewise, Bubblegum springs off the bed and starts for the door. Once there, she looks back at the vampire and commands, "Don't _move_. I would also say don't breathe, but you've got that covered already."

"Bonnibel, look—"

"_Stay_," reinforces the princess, "right there." And then she's gone, a flurry of pastel fast disappearing down the corridor.

"Sheesh," Marceline informs the now-silent bedroom.

A few minutes later the younger monarch's footfalls patter in the hallway again. Marceline, knee-deep in working out the finish of a song, only glances up when the princess reenters the chamber.

"Marceline, I brought—"

"Hang on, hang on." Frowning down at her guitar, the vampire mutters, "Listen to this. You've got a good ear—you can tell me. What's missing?" Shifting the instrument into her leg's groove, Marceline strums out the melody she's been chipping at for a few days now. It's slower than her usual stuff but it isn't a dirge either, and when she reaches the last bit of it she sighs, "It's off. It—"

"Here, trade me," interrupts Bubblegum. Without fanfare she scoops the bass from Marceline's lap and replaces it with a bowl of ice cream. The lumps in said bowl smush together as Bubblegum plops down next to the older girl, carefully cradling the bass in the cage of her elbows. "It's your ending," she supplies. "You're sliding into a deceptive cadence. That's fine if you're trying to write, I dunno, a death march, but—"

"Back up, back up," Marceline insists, palming the bowl. "Not all of us take fancy theory classes on everything. A deceptive what now?"

"_Cadence_," Bubblegum repeats. "It's, uhm—it's the sound in a song that signals an ending or a stop to the music. And what you're finishing with now is a _deceptive_ cadence, like… you're ending it but it doesn't _sound _like you're ending it. Not to your audience, anyway." Bubblegum summates, "It's _confusing_."

"…yeah. Tell me about it." The ice cream is strawberry, done up in liberal red sprinkles and doused with cherries. Plucking one of the last, the vampire sucks free its colorful essence, lobs the stem into her mouth to chew it, and asks, "So how do I fix it? Show me."

Leaning easily back into Marceline's shoulder, Bubblegum hoists the bass up between her knees and rests it lengthwise over her lap. It's too big for her to hold properly. "You create a stronger cadence. Like this," she says, and spanks her fingers down against the strings. The resulting sound is pleasant if not off-key. Wincing, the princess insists, "Wait—let me think how to transpose it."

She hunches over the bass, eyes closed. Marceline watches her and uses the nail of her pinky to ferret individual sprinkles from her bowl, draining them and flicking the gray remnants behind Bubblegum's bed while the princess is preoccupied.

"Okay," says Bubblegum after a moment. "Okay, yeah. It should go like this…"

She hits the strings a second time, pulling from them a series of notes that do admittedly sound better than Marceline's earlier attempt. The vampire perks. "Again," she encourages the younger musician, setting the bowl of ice cream aside. "Slower, so I can see."

Bubblegum complies: twice, thrice. She hands back the bass and Marceline fingers through the chords with ease, mumbling, "Yeah, yeah baby—it's good you're gone. Yeah, yeah baby—you did me so wrong, oh—" She looks up, smiling, but Bubblegum's face is solemn versus excited. "Hey," she murmurs, "good job." And then, "Bonnibel, wow. It's okay."

"No it isn't. You're writing a song about him," Bubblegum points out. "A _sad _song. With a _deceptive _cadence."

"Eh, you helped me ditch the cadence, didn't ya? And it's a _cleansing _song." Leaning the bass against the bed's edge, Marceline hooks her arm about the princess and assures her, "I'm cool. Seriously. I mean, how could I be anything but? I've got you here to make me feel better. And"—she reaches out with her free hand to pick it up—"ice cream."

"Lumpy Space Princess said it was an anesthetic for boy-related wounds," acquiesces Bubblegum. Peering anxiously at the vampire, she pursues, "But how can you be okay so fast? I might not know anything about boys, but I _do_ know that variables kept together for extended periods tend to leave lasting impressions on one another even if they're separated later. And Ash was with you for a long time…"

There's not much of the ice cream left now. Spooning up one of the remaining livid cherries, Marceline pops it into her friend's mouth and murmurs, "I've had a couple weeks to get all the crying and crud out of my system. Yeah," she affirms as Bubblegum scowls furiously around the spoon's handle, "I cried. But I'm done now, all right? _Done_."

Swallowing, Bubblegum licks her lips and responds doubtfully, "It's possible to do that? You can just _stop _caring about him? About what happened?" Handing back the spoon, the princess goes on, "You can stop… you know. Missing him?" Her fingertips brush Marceline's and she wonders, "You do miss him, don't you?"

Marceline drops the spoon into the bowl and thinks of her stupid blue wizard ex-boyfriend: his chortling laughter and the umbrella he so often shared with her despite not needing it himself, his hand curled over hers on the handle. Her throat tightens and her chest throbs, a sharp, shivering pain lancing down cold where her heart used to beat. Her eyes water, sting. Bubblegum notices and makes a noise low in her throat, belting her arms about the vampire's middle.

"Yeah," Marceline agrees when she feels she can trust her voice not to wobble too much. "Yeah, I miss him. Plop," she adds, and scrubs her sleeve over her face, "so much for being done with crying, huh?"

Bubblegum's arms constrict a little more. "He is _indeed _a dbag," the princess seethes. "The—the _biggest_."

Mute, Marceline nods. She dampens her sleeve and Bubblegum holds onto her with all the tenacity of a leech, and when the tears are done the queen manages, "All right, so yeah. Maybe I'm not okay yet."

"I can go get more ice cream," volunteers Bubblegum. "There's black cherry too. And watermelon."

"…_watermelon _ice cream?" Shaking her head, Marceline determines, "I'm good. I mean, I'm not—you know." She waves a hand. "But the point is I'm _trying _to be okay with it. I'm trying to move on."

"You're sure you don't want to plot his demise? Because my teachers say I show a great penchant for creation in chemistry and I have to agree with them—I'll bet I could whip up something that'll give him, I don't know, _fatal diarrhea_—"

"If I wanted him dead, Bonnibel, I could've killed him myself." But Marceline drops her face into Bubblegum's hair, chuckling, and husks to the princess, "You're really sweet to offer, though."

"Said offer will stand as long as you're even a _little _sad, Marceline. I promise it will."

"Noted, noted." With a sigh, Marceline allows, "But it's not good to dwell on shit like this, believe me. You wanted me to tell you about boys? Not worth drawing a line over. Let me act all old and sagely and junk and tell you about _relationships _instead, yeah?"

"Relationships?"

"Uh-huh." Lifting her head again and shifting away from the princess a little, Marceline takes up her bass again. She leaves the strings alone, though, and settles for simply holding it. "Relationships with boys, with girls—"

"_Girls_?"

"You heard me. _Relationships_," stresses Marceline, "with anyone, whatever they are, how long they last, how deep they go—yeah. There's only one thing you need to keep in mind about them, okay?" Holding up her index finger, she reinforces, "One."

"Okay." Bubblegum blinks attentively. "What is it?"

"When the other person doesn't make you happy anymore," Marceline provides simply, "you need to let them go so you can find someone else who will. Make you happy, I mean."

"Oooooh," says Bubblegum. "That's deep, Marceline."

"Yeah?"

"Yes."

"Well, you know." The moment feels opportune, so the vampire plucks out a mellow G on her bass. "I try."

They sit for a while in companionable almost-quiet then, Marceline strumming and Bubblegum thinking. The moon rises in the window, swollen for the month's end; across the kingdom the lights wink out. Night deepens its dome over the land.

"Marceline?" ventures the princess at last.

"Uh-huh?"

"I was wondering if, uhm… if I could ask you something specific about what you said earlier. If you could expand on the topic, maybe."

Marceline grins and rolls her guitar away across the bed's vast array of pillows. "Sure. What's it?" She flicks her eyes to Bubblegum's face.

The smaller monarch gazes back at her, the corner of her mouth puckered, color rising in her cheeks. "Girls," she says. She nibbles her lips from the inside and rushes on next, "You think it's okay to, uhm. To have relationships with girls?"

"What's this?" Marceline volleys back, motioning between them.

"I mean—like. A dating sort of… relationship. You think that's okay?"

Opening her hands into stars, Marceline affirms with a shrug, "Hey, whatever keeps the music moving." But she nudges, "Does it skeeve you, Bonnibel?"

"No!" the princess denies loudly. Clapping her hands over her mouth, she giggles and whispers again, "_No_, no. I've just never really _thought _about it. Is it soft, kissing another girl?"

"Who says I've kissed another girl?"

"So you haven't?"

"Who," teases the vampire, "says I haven't?"

"_Marceline_." Pouting now, Bubblegum drops onto the mattress facedown nearby Marceline and huffs, "You're _impossible_."

"Hey, I'm just trying to facilitate a better learning experience for you, Bonnibel."

The princess peeks through the gap beneath her elbow. "What do you mean?"

"I _mean_"—and Marceline rolls her eyes—"if you really wanna know how it is, do it yourself and find out. That's the best way to know if you like something, right?"

Slowly levering herself up on her arms again, Bubblegum acknowledges, "Yes. Yes, it is." And suddenly there's an expression on her face that's a mix of determined and intent, a kind of squinch to her eyes and a tension to her chin. Before Marceline can ask her whether she's constipated or something, the princess reaches up, grabs a handful of the vampire's t-shirt, and gives it a yank. Unbalanced, Marceline drops across the girl broadside: their foreheads smack and Marceline yelps and Bubblegum feathers her mouth clumsily over the vampire's lower lip.

She is still doing this when Peppermint Butler walks into the room a millisecond later.

Marceline's met the guy before, sure, exchanged head nods and stuff with him. She now has the delightful surprise of meeting the business end of his tea tray as he flings it straight at her head. "PEDOPHILE!" he shrieks, pointing at her. "PREDATOR!" The tray smacks into Marceline's temple; Bubblegum's hold on her lip lets go with an audible _smuck_. "GUARDS!" the butler wails. "_GUARDS_!"

Hot tea splatters down Marceline's face. She recoils, hissing and writhing and half-tempted to strangle the spherical little servant dude. The only reason she doesn't is the expression on Bubblegum's face.

The princess looks _smug_. Like she's just gotten first prize at the science fair. Blue ribbon, baby.

Laughter bubbles up from Marceline's guts in a geyser. Wheezing out barks of it, she dodges the butler's next projectile—a hairbrush hastily seized from the nearby bureau—and grabs her bass. Hopping to the window next, she asks the princess, "Was it soft, Bonnibel?"

"_GUARDS_!" He's almost hoarse.

"Like snow," Bubblegum replies shamelessly, and adds, "I think it was the ice cream."

A tube of lip gloss pings off the windowpane. Laughing still, Marceline leaps out into the night.

Covered in hot tea or not, she feels the best she has in weeks.


End file.
